EditorialHospitals great catch After 15 years at the helm of Village Care of New York, Arthur Webb is moving on to become chief operating officer of St. Vincents Hospital. When Webb arrived at V.C.N.Y.  which operates the Village Nursing Home on Hudson St. and the Rivington House AIDS residence on the Lower East Side, among others  it was an $18 million operation; by this years end, it will be a $145 million organization.

Talking PointPaying for Yankee Stadium is a major league errorBy Deborah Glick
Tough financial times require tough choices. This is as true for the many New Yorkers who struggle to make ends meet at this time of record unemployment as it is for city and state government, each of which faces enormous budget gaps that must be closed. While each of us is tempted by luxuries, the more responsible individual prioritizes the use of scarce funding to first cover lifes necessities. Certainly, a family struggling to pay for care for an elderly parent would be wise to forgo purchasing a top-of-the-line, big-screen TV.

Operation Pressure PointTwenty-five years ago, The Villager reported in a front-page news story on Feb. 2, 1984, about the start of major police efforts to combat drugs in the area today known as the East Village.

Serving West and East Village, Chelsea, SoHo, NoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Lower East Side

Villager photo by J.B. Nicholas

Police responded to the scene after a van backed over two preschool children in Chinatown last Thursday.

P.S. 3 capsule deeded to society at historic momentBy Albert Amateau
Notebooks and pencils in hand, 50 students from P.S. 3 in Greenwich Village went uptown to the New-York Historical Society last week for the formal installation of the 1917 time capsule found in their school in November.

NewsAntonio Pagan, a former city councilmember, is dead at 50By Lincoln Anderson
Antonio Pagan, the former East Village city councilmember, died at Beth Israel Hospital at 2:45 a.m. on Sunday. He was 50 years old. According to friends, the cause of death was kidney failure, although another friend said it might have been a stroke.

Rent drama at Archive has a surprising dénouementBy Heather Murray
Several months after a developer told its nonprofit tenants in the sprawling Archive Building that their rents would skyrocket by as much as 500 percent, City Council Speaker Christine Quinns Office and city and state agencies discovered that developer Rockrose Corporation couldnt legally raise the tenants rent without the states consent.

Reflections of a 1960s radicalBy Jericho Parms
From the abandoned squats and rundown tenements, a longhaired band of lost young souls roamed the streets of the Lower East Side.

Dollars, discord and broken dreamsBy Scott Harrah
This drama by Richard Greenberg, the Tony-winning playwright of Take Me Out, and the Tony-winning director David Grindley (Journeys End) is a disappointment on so many levels. What starts out as a simple, touching story about a German-Jewish immigrant mother, Eva Adler (the always marvelous Mercedes Ruehl), and her slightly neurotic daughter, Lily (Lili Rabe), spending a summer in the Catskills circa 1960 ends up being a convoluted mess, with an awkward narrative thats unfocused and unsatisfying for audiences.

Channeling icons spirit while trying to pay the rentBy Monica Uszerowicz
To worry is to use the imagination wastefully: This was the philosophy of Gene Frankel, one of Off-Broadways icons and its muse. With the ongoing attrition of the citys avant-garde theater spaces, Frankels story has become the already-wrought tale of the unsung hero. Better remembered are his contemporaries, though it was his spirit that helped set all of them into collective motion.

Remembrance of things pastBy Matt Harvey
In the late1920s Carl Jung had a dream about Liverpool, then the second busiest port of the worlds most powerful empire. The psychoanalyst associated the dreams contenta flowering tree in the middle of the city squarewith mans unconscious relationship to an ancient cosmology.

Koch on FilmBy Ed KochDefiance (-) Regrettably, this is not a very good film. Defiance recounts the true story of the Bielski brothers who were Polish Jews living in the ghetto of Belarus.Notorious (-) Notorious tells the story of the talented rapper Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls, who was murdered in 1997 at the age of 24.

The Class graduatesBy Steve Erickson
Is there any cinematic sub-genre more abject than the tales of inspirational teachers who save their students lives? Despite good intentions, such films invariably wind up implying that poverty can be overcome if only a superhero teacher is present to inspire his or her students.